1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a configurable architecture for managing corporate and industry knowledgebases for a set of customers, in general, and more specifically to providing customers with the ability to configure and tailor the configurable architecture such that host knowledgebase as well as the environment for delivering the knowledgebase may be configured and tailored.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most methods and apparatus available today for configuring and tailoring data allow customers to configure data applications only to a limited extent. The methods and apparatus available today fail to provide the ability to configure flexibly configure workflow for readymade projects/templates, create new projects/templates, or to configure the environment, which may include customer instances corresponding to each of the customers along with a host instance, each according to its needs and requirements. Therefore, when encountering changing circumstances or needs, the application is required to be reprogrammed frequently by the application provider to create a new set of readymade projects/templates within the application, or the customer is required to obtain another version of the application. Furthermore, none of the methods and apparatus available today deploys a host instance for all the customers to access along with corresponding customer instances for each of the customers to access and modify as well as combinations of data and application elements from both host and customer instances.
For example, an application provider serves a customer with multiple users, such as a brand manager and vice president of marketing. The application provider provides the customer with workflow models, and the customer in turn provides the workflow models to its users. In other words, the brand manager that focuses on direct marketing promotions in the consumer packaged goods industry gets a workflow model associated with his specific area of work, and the vice president of marketing that focuses on advertising initiatives gets a workflow model specific to her specific area of work. Although specific to customers' and users' needs, such workflow models are based on application provider-defined material. The methods and apparatus available today do not provide the customer the ability to modify the application provider-defined or default material with customer-defined material using a corresponding customer instance. In other words, for example, if the vice president of marketing wants or needs to redefine certain workflow model fields, the application provider would have to either reprogram the workflow model or provide the vice president with another version of the application.
Some methods and apparatus available today provide for customization of software codes rather than configuration. For example, enterprise software packages provided for in-house deployment at the client site, and application service provider delivery models both require that software codes, such as new patch, upgrade or application (developed and delivered) be customized rather than configured. In other words, such models do not provide high levels of tailoring without software code customization, and consequently, fail to reduce the cost and time associated with such efforts.
Further, none of the methods and apparatus available today allow the customers to configure a marketing knowledgebase of documents, metadata, application work processes, as well the environment; or to configure the manner in which that knowledgebase interacts with ready made projects/workflow templates.